A dizzying story that involves falsified medical research, plagiarism, and legal threats came to light via a DMCA takedown notice today. Retraction Watch, a site that followed (among many other issues) the implosion of a Duke cancer researcher's career, found all of its articles on the topic pulled by WordPress, its host. The reason? A small site based in India apparently copied all of the posts, claimed them as their own, then filed a DMCA takedown notice to get the originals pulled from their source. As of now, the originals are still missing as their actual owners seek to have them restored.

This is extremely worrying. Even though the original story is careful not to make accusations, I will. This sure smells like a "Reputation Defense" dirty trick.

Posted
by
kdawson
on Sunday April 18, 2010 @06:16PM
from the boom-boom dept.

TheOtherChimeraTwin notes that the shuttle Discovery will land at Kennedy Space Center on Monday morning at 8:48 EDT. The craft will make a rare "descending node" overflight of the continental US en route to landing in Florida. Here are maps of the shuttle's path if is lands on orbit 222 as planned, or on the next orbit. Spaceweather.com says: "...it takes the shuttle about 35 minutes to traverse the path shown... Observers in the northwestern USA will see the shuttle shortly after 5 am PDT blazing like a meteoric fireball through the dawn sky. As Discovery makes its way east, it will enter daylight and fade into the bright blue background. If you can't see the shuttle, however, you might be able to hear it. The shuttle produces a sonic double-boom that reaches the ground about a minute and a half after passing overhead."

Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday March 27, 2010 @10:31PM
from the its-missing-apostrophes dept.

tazzbit writes "The storage vendors have been crowing about data deduplication technology for some time now, but a new open source project, Opendedup, brings it to Linux and its hypervisors — KVM, Xen and VMware. The new deduplication-based file system called SDFS (GPL v2) is scalable to eight petabytes of capacity with 256 storage engines, which can each store up to 32TB of deduplicated data. Each volume can be up to 8 exabytes and the number of files is limited by the underlying file system. Opendedup runs in user space, making it platform independent, easier to scale and cluster, and it can integrate with other user space services like Amazon S3."

coondoggie writes: NASA’s space shuttle Endeavour is closed for the Christmas holiday but plenty of work is going on around it. NASA said that the shuttle’s hatch has been closed and warm air is being blown into the shuttle to keep critical internal systems at about 70 degrees during the holiday break as final preparations for the mission are set for a scheduled Feb. 7 launch. Endeavour will be carrying the 21 ft long, 14 ft wide, 27,000 pound life support module known as Tranquility to the International Space Station. A “room with a view” module known as the Cupola module is also part of the ISS package heading into orbit.[spam URL stripped]Link to Original Source

Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday October 20, 2009 @09:01AM
from the quite-the-ecosystem dept.

wiseandroid writes "It's not even a year ago that the HTC Dream G1 became the first Android enabled phone to be released publicly (on October 22nd, 2008) and now we have listed more than 50 Android phones expected in the near future." Of the 51 phones on this list, 12 (from nine manufacturers) are currently available.

Think about this for a moment. Medicare is a huge, single-payer, government-run program. It ought to provide the perfect environment for experimentation. If more-efficient government management can slash health-care costs by addressing all these problems, why not start with Medicare? Let's see what "better management" looks like applied to Medicare before we roll it out to the rest of the country.
This is not a completely cynical suggestion. Medicare is, for instance, a l

Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday February 09, 2009 @02:06PM
from the read-all-about-it dept.

stoolpigeon writes "I vividly remember the first time I was able to dial up a BBS with my Commodore VIC-20. It was Star Trek themed, and I was excited to see that the Sysop was online. We typed a few lines of text back and forth while I hollered to everyone in the house that I was talking to someone through the computer. Things have come a long way since then, and I've put in quite a few hours experiencing one of the more exciting sides of the internet: participating in community. Of course it hasn't all been great. Communities on-line are just like any other, in that there are differences of opinion and issues that arise. Some are handled well, some are not. Social interaction can be very complicated, and learning how to manage a social site can be a process that involves a lot of painful lessons. Fortunately not all of our learning has to come through direct experience. Sometimes we have the opportunity to learn from the experience of others. Patrick O'Keefes book Managing Online Forums is that guide to the budding leader of the web's next great community. Keep reading for the rest of JR's review.

Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday February 06, 2009 @05:43AM
from the now-with-more-battles-and-extra-fields dept.

Electronic Arts announced at New York Comic Con that the Battlefield series would be getting two more titles. Battlefield 1943 will be focused on multiplayer, and it's due out for download this summer. It will be available through the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live, and there will be a PC version as well. A website has been launched for the game, and it contains a trailer. Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is scheduled for winter, and it will be available for the PC, PS3, and Xbox 360 also. Details for Bad Company 2 are sparse, though one exec said, "... it takes everything that players liked in the original and ups the ante — more vehicles, more destruction and more team play."

Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday February 02, 2009 @01:12PM
from the read-all-about-it dept.

stoolpigeon writes "Facebook became the largest worldwide social site in the middle of last year. If their current pace holds they will pass MySpace as number one in the US some time next year. Those numbers have led a number of people to strike out and develop Facebook applications, hoping to grab a piece of that huge audience. One aspect of writing such applications is knowing Facebook Markup Language, which has been described as the icing on the Facebook API cake. FBML Essentials aims to be the resource that provides hopeful application writers with what they need to use FBML successfully." Keep reading for the rest of JR's review.

Posted
by
samzenpus
on Monday December 22, 2008 @02:26PM
from the read-all-about-it dept.

stoolpigeon writes "John Scalzi, the author of Hugo Award-nominated science fiction novel Old Man's War, has built what started as a story serialized in his blog into a series of full novels and short stories. The latest installment in the OMW universe, Zoe's Tale, is quite a departure from the previous three books. It is the first of Scalzi's sci-fi novels written intentionally as young adult fiction. In a move that I am sure will continue to fuel Scalzi/Heinlein comparisons, Zoe is a precocious young woman thrust into a world of adventure and danger. In just three years Scalzi has built an impressive resume as an author of fiction, and Zoe's Tale will be no small part of what looks to be an influential and outstanding career." Keep reading for the rest of JR's review.

Posted
by
kdawson
on Friday September 26, 2008 @09:01AM
from the at-your-service dept.

mollyhackit writes "We've seen tiny Web servers in the past, but rarely ones that are home-built. Here's a guide to building your own tiny web server with a footprint no larger than a business card. The design uses two major chips. One handles the SPI to MAC/PHY translation for the ethernet jack. The other chip is a PIC24F, which hosts a simple web server and reads files stored on a microSD card. All components run at a low 3.3 volts. Part of the compactness of the design comes from the PIC24F having programmable pins; only four jumper wires were needed. The single-sided SMD design is easy to manufacture at home. Part 1 covered many of the 24F's features and both posts have full code available."

darthcamaro writes: Months after Dan Kaminsky's big DNS flaw disclosure, not much is being done to further DNS security — expect that is at the.ORG gTLD. The.ORG domain registry is the first of the big three (.com/.net and.org) to publicly try and implement DNSSEC, and according to a new report is on track for initial rollout in early 2009.
From the article:
"Our motivation for implementing DNSSEC within.ORG is not commercially driven, we have no other product and this is not a money maker for us," ORG's CEO Alexa Raad said. " We're a non-profit registry, the motivation for us is something more long term and that is to help in the upgrade of the Internet overall. So even though we look forward to.org being signed, we're looking forward to sharing the results of our experience so we can encourage other registries to upgrade their infrastructure."

"Email addresses represent the thinnest slice of information that people receive from one another. Using 599 e-mail addresses of young adults, their self-reported personality scores and the personality judgments of 100 independent observers, it was shown that personality impressions based solely on e-mail addresses were consensually shared by observers. Moreover, these impressions contained some degree of validity. This was true for neuroticism, openness, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and narcissism but not for extraversion."

An anonymous reader writes: If you are a Gentoo user, you've probably noticed that things are getting — umm — quiet at the ole' homestead. The first release in a year _still_ isn't based on gcc 4.2, but no worries — you're looking forward to being an early adopter of KDE4.1. You check the package list — that's strange — no KDE4 packages? Asking the Google genie yields this — 11 days of posts before it is mentioned that Gentoo's lead KDE developer has been forcibly retired and there's more or less ONE guy left working on the official packages!

CurrentlyI am an IT guy for Campus Crusade for Christ International. I work as Director of Technology for Eastern Europe and Russia. I work out of the area office in Budapest, Hungary. There is much more about CCCI and us at our home page, ThePeckFamily.us [thepeckfamily.us] PastI was born in Kalamazoo, MI - grew up in Phoenix, AZ - spent a little time in the Navy, homeported out of Alameda, CA - picked up a B.A. in Theology at Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, IL - picked up a B.S. in I.T. at DeVry in Phoenix. I worked in the corporate world as a programmer and DBA